1. My brothers got curly hair, though Mark, my younger brother keeps it cropped close. My older brother, Anthony, has big bushy hair. He’s been mistaken for Cuban, Puerto Rican, Native American, Samoan…once in a while they say he looks Filipino.   2. I once heard that Jesus would have looked like this. That if...

Choosing a booth, I usher my two boys into their seats. They bounce and squawk like tiny grackles, unable to settle. Happy Meals in Utah no longer come in the brightly colored cardboard boxes of my childhood with golden-arched handles and smiling Grimaces. I pull their meatless cheeseburgers from a non-descript sack, split the dry...

We need money. Sorry for the frankness, but I’m told obfuscation has no place in contemporary literature. I’ve also been dishonest pretty much my entire life, and I’m turning over a new leaf. My wife and I haven’t been able to quit smoking, but we’re trying. I don’t know about her, but it’s one of...

Tonight, the steps that lead from the porch to the gravel road groan one at a time. One at a time, these eleven cabin steps make such mournful sounds. The bottom step sings the saddest—then quiet footsteps on a gravel path. Tonight, the river runs slow (and black), and a rowboat sighs against the shore....

At thirteen, I fell in love on Shasta Lake. If not love, then something that I couldn’t yet name, a dizzy weak-kneed rush that knocked me broadside the day I saw her leap Levi-clad from the shore and arise dripping, and I didn’t know what else to do but leap myself and surface to the...

Chris broke his back in Pennsylvania. It happened before I met him, before he showed me with pride the SS uniform his grandfather had worn during WWII, before he tipped our Waffle House waitress a fifty-dollar bill. Before we ran out of crack cocaine. Before I came along for the ride. He made a sloppy...

This is what my mother’s midlife crisis looks like: She’s on a stage at the Cross County Mall in West Palm, black wig nesting her head, black leotard hidden beneath a black-and-white checkered faux fur. I’ve drawn a tattoo on her left arm with a ballpoint pen while she’s thickened her lips with a red...

LEGACY Appearances matter. Dress properly. Observe the social proprieties. Send thank you notes promptly. Be gracious and kind to all. Impeccable hygiene, please. Smile. It makes all the difference.   THE FALL My mom, at ninety-two, fell down a flight of marble stairs at an art exhibition and broke her femur at the hip. She...

Newborns can only see as far as the distance between their mother’s nipples and her face. For weeks, touch is how they understand this bright new world. They feel the warm and the cold. They feel the suck of air scouring their flesh. Until the 1980s it was believed that babies didn’t feel pain. When...

The males [of many animal species]. . . continue to vie for the prize of siring offspring via the one-celled messengers of themselves they leave as a consequence of mating: their sperm. [1] Fuck is everywhere, scrawled in black felt pen on the stall walls of the third floor girls’ room or chalked across the...

I’m sitting in the bathtub of 905 Kings Highway. We rent this tiny, yellow house. It’s a rancher with a rock garden my mom built. One of the neighbors has a tire swing. The boy who lives there is a few years older than me. He wears shiny Umbros. Scotty. I imagine what his shorts...

You don’t write about me, he once complained. Or maybe twice, maybe he was always asking why he never landed on my page. You give me no trouble, I told him. You’re simply here whenever I check. Perhaps one day I’ll surprise you. That will be the day, I said, and then that day, it...